The modern communications era has brought about a tremendous expansion of wireline and wireless networks. Computer networks, television networks, and telephony networks are experiencing an unprecedented technological expansion, fueled by consumer demand. Networking technologies have addressed related consumer demands, while providing more flexibility and immediacy of information transfer.
Current and future networking technologies continue to facilitate ease of information transfer and convenience to users by expanding the capabilities of electronic devices and by improving network performance. One advance that has improved the capabilities of electronic devices to provide services to users is the use of public key cryptography. Public key cryptography uses people, equipment and policies to manage the generation, use and revocation of digital certificates. A certificate authority (CA) is typically responsible for issuing the digital certificates.
Public key cryptography assumes the existence of a pair of keys for each user, a private key and a public key. The keys are bound to each other in a way that protects the system from malicious users. The validity of these keys and the fact that a key belongs to an identity is assured by the CA through publishing of the digital certificate. Once the identities and their keys are in place, users can employ their respective certificates to identify themselves to each other. Certificates typically have a natural expiration date, but they can be revoked before they expire naturally as well.
Networks use information indicative of the identity of devices for both enabling authorized devices to use the network and for preventing other devices from having access privileges based on the status of the certificates. When a device has access to a guaranteed broadband channel, the device can contact the appropriate authority to confirm identification of a certain user. However, a problem may arise when a device does not have any reliable access to a server, or the access is of low bandwidth, both of which may make the process of identification much more complex.
Situations where guaranteed access to a base station is not available can arise under any of a number of circumstances. For example, being in remote areas or being in tunnels or other underground or heavily shielded environments are not uncommon situations for some people to encounter. As such, a user may have a device that does not have guaranteed access to a user that is trusted, while other devices that are more powerful or otherwise situated advantageously may still be able to access a local server. Accordingly, it is typically important for users to be able to identify other devices that they encounter since some could be malicious and intrusive.